This volume contains the combined Proceedings of the Second International Meeting on Commutative Algebra and Related Areas (SIMCARA) held from July 22-26, 2019, at the Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Carlos, Brazil, and the AMS Special Session on Commutative Algebra, held from September 14-15, 2019, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin. These two meetings celebrated the combined 150th birthday of Roger and Sylvia Wiegand. The Wiegands have been a fixture in the commutative algebra community, as well as the wider mathematical community, for over 40 years. Articles in this volume cover various areas of factorization theory, homological algebra, ideal theory, representation theory, homological rigidity, maximal Cohen-Macaulay modules, and the behavior of prime spectra under completion, as well as some topics in related fields. The volume itself bears evidence that the area of commutative algebra is a vibrant one and highlights the influence of the Wiegands on generations of researchers. It will be useful to researchers and graduate students.

This is the first of two volumes of a state-of-the-art survey article collection which originates from three commutative algebra sessions at the 2009 Fall Southeastern American Mathematical Society Meeting at Florida Atlantic University. The articles reach into diverse areas of commutative algebra and build a bridge between Noetherian and non-Noetherian commutative algebra. These volumes present current trends in two of the most active areas of commutative algebra: non-noetherian rings (factorization, ideal theory, integrality), and noetherian rings (the local theory, graded situation, and interactions with combinatorics and geometry). This volume contains combinatorial and homological surveys. The combinatorial papers document some of the increasing focus in commutative algebra recently on the interaction between algebra and combinatorics. Specifically, one can use combinatorial techniques to investigate resolutions and other algebraic structures as with the papers of Floystad on Boij-Soederburg theory, of Geramita, Harbourne and Migliore, and of Cooper on Hilbert functions, of Clark on minimal poset resolutions and of Mermin on simplicial resolutions. One can also utilize algebraic invariants to understand combinatorial structures like graphs, hypergraphs, and simplicial complexes such as in the paper of Morey and Villarreal on edge ideals. Homological techniques have become indispensable tools for the study of noetherian rings. These ideas have yielded amazing levels of interaction with other fields like algebraic topology (via differential graded techniques as well as the foundations of homological algebra), analysis (via the study of D-modules), and combinatorics (as described in the previous paragraph). The homological articles the editors have included in this volume relate mostly to how homological techniques help us better understand rings and singularities both noetherian and non-noetherian such as in the papers by Roberts, Yao, Hummel and Leuschke.

This book is aimed to provide an introduction to local cohomology which takes cognizance of the breadth of its interactions with other areas of mathematics. It covers topics such as the number of defining equations of algebraic sets, connectedness properties of algebraic sets, connections to sheaf cohomology and to de Rham cohomology, Grobner bases in the commutative setting as well as for $D$-modules, the Frobenius morphism and characteristic $p$ methods, finiteness properties of local cohomology modules, semigroup rings and polyhedral geometry, and hypergeometric systems arising from semigroups. The book begins with basic notions in geometry, sheaf theory, and homological algebra leading to the definition and basic properties of local cohomology. Then it develops the theory in a number of different directions, and draws connections with topology, geometry, combinatorics, and algorithmic aspects of the subject.